The sweet smell of competition is lingering in the air. That sweet smell which indicates that somewhere in the vicinity a company is working on actually improving a product so we can all benefit. This time around, it's Adobe, delivering the first Flash 10.2 beta. Prime feature? Complete hardware acceleration of the entire video pipeline - fully cross platform, cross-form factor. Cross-platform! There's a catch, though.

My preference for Flash videos is actually to use the Firefox extension Video DownloadHelper to save a version of the video in a standard MPEG-4 container to watch offline. It makes saving embedded Flash video files easy. YouTube has plain .mp4 versions of most of their videos, and I'll take those over Flash files--I want to avoid anything Flash if possible, I'll take a "proper" video format any day. Of course, the .flv files can be saved as well if a particular video (or site) has no .mp4 version.

It's become more annoying lately (&fmt=18 has to manually be added to the URL for the MP4 file to be shown if it is available), but luckily it still works. And all 720p/1080p videos seem to be MP4 files by default.